Tag: body work

10 Dec 2017 – The hallway to the kitchens is thick with people and the smell of boxing oil. I’m not fighting tonight, but feel as anxious as I would at an art opening: I’m smiling too much, overly aware of being tall, and compensating for it (to whom?) by darting furtively along the walls, like a rat.

I hear my name, and see kru A.’s hand raised above the crowd in that familiar gesture when he calls me over to him to start training. He’s almost naked, except his hips, which are wrapped neatly in dark red cloth, secured with ropes running over the front and back. His hands and arms are armored in rope up to the elbow. He’s about to perform the ceremonial wai kru to open the event tonight. We both glance down at his body, shining with oil and sweat. ‘It’s hot!’ he says, laughing. ‘You look… you look… good!’ I stammer back, feeling like a rock star just said hello to me backstage. I wonder if I should hug him or ask for a selfie, instead I blurt out ‘Uhh, I’ll see you later!’ and scurry away, mouthing ‘Sharon, you idiot’ to myself like a dazzled 16 year-old.

I find the corner where my teammate V. is waiting to face her first fight. Fear and ebullience hits her in alternating waves, closer and closer together, like labour contractions. ‘Whooaahh, I feel alive!’ she whoops, followed immediately by ‘Oh shit. I need to pee. Why do I need to pee again? I just peed 2 minutes ago!’. I laugh and hold her hands and massage her shoulders, glad it’s her and not me, but envious too.

The familiar snake music drifts over, and I sneak into the ballroom where the stage is. It’s just starting. Kru A. is in the middle of the ring, hazy in the spotlight. When he moves he seems bound and unbound by the sinuous sound – now pulsing, now liquid – and above, or perhaps, below it all, stillness. His face is drawn inward, as if looking at a point far inside where the people watching can’t go.

After certain movements, he nods his head slightly, as if to himself. They’re enigmatic and weirdly articulate, those nods. Appraising. So the sun might nod to a mountain, or a wall, or a tomb, or the edge of a meadow, as it moved across them. A tiger might nod like that to a king, before it decided to eat him, or walk away.

His complete presence in his body makes me suddenly aware of my own. My back straightens; I take a breath. Another. My eyes come back into my face – I realize they’ve been floating about like holographic projections on the lam. My attention follows, sliding into focus, sweet and sure. The sense comes back into my sinews.

He raises his arms, fists outwards, and his torso arches like a tongue of light. I feel the beauty undoing me, the beginning of tears.

My whole being is suffused with hopeless longing, shot through with a sharp prick of joy: light glinting off the peak of a mountain I will never reach. The grace, the self-possession. The total ownership of body. More than winning fights, more than anything, I want that; to earn that.

All through the evening and night, through the ups and downs of the fights, the afterimage of my kru lingers. A quick ride home, a hasty dinner. At last, in the quiet hug of solitude, I tell myself, then text it to the people I love: I saw a mountain today, I saw a mountain.

~

Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.

Part 1, Part 2

I went to a new gym today. When asked, I say I’ve been ‘doing’ (taking classes in) muay thai since December 2015, and ‘training’ (classes 3 – 5 times a week) since this year. In fact, I picked up kickboxing over ten years ago, when I came back from studying overseas, and again when I was 30, just before moving from the city to Port Dickson. I never took it seriously, but no one else took me seriously either. The closest someone got was a trainer who told me, offhandedly, ‘you could probably get pretty good at this’. He also, possibly in reaction to my stony suffering face during our 7am sessions, regularly asked if I was depressed.

Until recently, I’ve had trainers hit on me in every gym I have ever been in. This is not to say that I’m somehow extraordinary, rather that I suspect this is the overwhelmingly ordinary experience of women in gyms, martial arts ones or otherwise.

Now, at 36, no one hits on me. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve learned to take myself seriously. I’ve had to ask for everything I wanted in muay thai – better trainers, more sparring, the opportunity to fight, or simply to be left alone. Not long ago, someone (it could only have been a man) asked if English was my second language, because ‘you seem… kind of reserved’. No, I replied, my English is perfect, it’s that I want to practice punching this bag instead of talking to you.

Sometimes, especially when my body registers the very real difference in endurance between now and when I was 30, I wish I’d learned to speak my desire – to ask – earlier. But I don’t really regret. Part of aging is knowing certain kinds of learning only come with time, like wingseeds borne spinning down by gravity.

Still, I think a lot about how I look in the gym. Pink and green is a favorite color combination. Today, between the tight camouflage singlet and the loose camouflage t-shirt that I like to wear with my pink satin shorts, I chose the t-shirt.

A new gym means getting to know a new coach, his rhythm, his persona – who, really, he is. Martial art is full expression of the self with nowhere to hide, for both teacher and student. The first word ajarn J. said to me, as I took off my shoes at the door of his gym, was ‘welcome’.

I haven’t studied enough muay thai to be able to discern good teaching. I’m at the unicellular sponge phase, absorbing everything in the ever deepening water. But I know how I feel. Padwork with ajarn J. was like dancing with a great partner. I felt the joy bouncing off me, coming out in explosive little laughs, even as I gasped for breath. In three 3 minute rounds I learned an astonishing amount, which I will note here, in an effort to retain as much as I can in the sieve of my body and brain:

No skipping in the left kick, or left knee. An easy, sure step with the right leg is all it takes. Note the difference in balance and power.

My knees could be angled more, and higher. And then turned into a block, where I press my shin against my opponent’s upper thighs, while grabbing their neck with my opposing arm.

Also, 3 different counters for the jab or punch – a teep to the lower lead leg for the jab, right teep for the punch. Sweep the jab with the right hand while sweeping the lead leg with your lead leg to throw the opponent forward. Sweep inside the punch and hook the back leg with the lead leg…? Damn, I can’t remember the sweeps.

I’ve never been able to do spinning back elbows with any kind of conviction. I mean, I know the move, but today I learned this: to apply the technique… you have to keep your eyes open. I was closing them at the moment of impact. This is what progress, and a good teacher, means in muay thai – realizing the split second of what the body is doing.

He kept distracting me, little flicks of his hand, pointing to the door, to the ceiling. I fell for it every single time. After the experience of keeping my eyes open during the spinning back elbows, something snapped into focus. I locked onto ajarn J.’s eyes, and entered a pocket of calm­ for maybe 20 seconds. In that pocket, no fear, no real effort or striving for the right technique. Just a pure focus in the moment and the other person facing me. It was… something I have been trying to achieve. I knew it intellectually – I experience flow regularly in art making – but my body had not known it in muay thai until then. The body does not go into the pocket because the mind wills it. No, that’s the difficulty – it’s a letting go, not a striving.

How do I extend these 20 seconds? This is the meaning of practice. Months, perhaps a year, for 20 seconds. Meanwhile: failure, defeat… and joy.

~

‘Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.